Facebook and Twitter will soon feel the 'MySpace Effect'
If you still have a MySpace you likely fit into one of three groups: You forgot to formally delete your account; you are trying to advertise your small-time band to a couple dozen hardcore leftover users; you log into MySpace right after you finish signing into AOL Desktop merely as a matter of old habit.
But I'm not interested in singling out those still using the service, as the droves of users who have dumped the website outright far outnumber the faithful by now. I'm outlining something I'd call the "MySpace Effect".
Good news for RIM fans: RIM unveils the 4G LTE BlackBerry Playbook
Suddenly RIM is in the news again, and this time it’s not about financial troubles or product delays to 2013.
Instead, the Canadian manufacturer announced the introduction of its new 4G LTE BlackBerry Playbook, along with the specifications of the 4G LTE 7-inch tablet aimed to bring stability to a company that’s facing difficult financial problems. When’s it coming and where?
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Opera 12.01 FINAL released with minor changes the order of the day
Norwegian browser developer Opera Software ASA has released Opera 12.01 FINAL, the latest stable build of its cross-platform, freeware web browser. Version 12.01 is a minor release, consisting mainly of bug fixes and security patches.
This follows the release of version 12, which boasted vastly improved startup times, experimental hardware acceleration, Do Not Track privacy features and 64-bit support on Windows and Mac. Version 12.01 follows shortly after Opera NEXT 12.50 released a new snapshot, previewing new features via a publicly available alpha build.
Dead Trigger is now free on iOS too, but is piracy really to blame?
A week after Madfinger Games made much to-do about piracy driving its decision to make first-person zombie shooting game Dead Trigger free on the Android platform, the game developer has now done the same for the iOS version.
Those who purchased the game while it was 99 cents will be given in-game currency 25 gold and ten casino chips in the 1.1.2 update. Unlike last time however, there is no grandstanding from CEO Marek Rabas on a privacy problem on Apple's mobile platform. All we know is that Madfinger is moving to a "freemium" model with Dead Trigger, and in one case, blamed it on piracy.
Why does Google subsidize Nexus 7?
To understand why Google subsidized the Nexus 7, you have to first understand what makes the tablet market unique from all other forms of personal computing. All personal computing devices fall into three major categories: PC, cellphone, and tablet (with possibilities for more in the future such as “smartglasses”, which Google and others are developing).
The PC market is mature, there have been very few changes since the nineties; functionality has steadily improved and the only big change was the advent of the laptop, which changed the form, although, it didn’t change the two main players: Apple and Microsoft, with Microsoft’s hardware manufacturers also playing an important role. The players in the PC market have changed little (sure HP bought Compaq and IBM sold out to Lenovo). It would take a truly revolutionary product to change anything even though there have been attempts -- the constant presence of Linux, and the recent (relatively) introduction of Chromebooks for example -- none have have managed to have any impact.
Yammer can now detect employee emotions
Yammer, the social network and messaging platform designed to be used within companies, announced on Thursday that Kanjoya's Crane sentiment analytics dashboard now integrates with Yammer, letting managers watch their employees' morale, attitudes, and reactions to procedural changes based upon their Yammer posts.
Crane correlates emotional "profiles" with behavior on the social network, and presents employee sentiment in various ways. Instead of trending topics, Crane shows Yammer's "trending emotions," Instead of finding the most popular and influential people, Crane shows whose posts on Yammer have the biggest emotional impact. It is similar to many content analysis engines, but it is tuned specifically to isolate emotional reactions.
Splashtop remote desktop launches on Windows 8
Even though the Windows Store is still only in Preview Mode, Splashtop Inc. on Thursday announced it had launched its flagship remote desktop client for Windows 8 there.
The popular Splashtop application lets users access their PC desktop from their mobile device, and with it, Windows 8 tablets will be able to connect to other Windows desktops and Mac OS desktops over Wi-Fi and 3G/4G data connections, with low enough graphical latency to enable remote gameplay and HD video streaming.
Switch applications more easily with 7 Taskbar Numberer
If you want to use the keyboard to switch from one Windows 7 application to another, you could press Alt+Tab repeatedly, cycling through all your programs until you reach the one you need.
But it could be easier to access it directly. If you see that Outlook’s taskbar icon is eighth from the left, for example, all you have to do is hold down the Windows key, press 8 and it’ll immediately jump to the foreground (or launch, if it’s a pinned shortcut).
Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is growing, but Gingerbread still rules them all
As manufacturers release upgrades to Android 4.0, and people buy Ice Cream Sandwich-based smartphones, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) accounts for 15.9 percent market share of the Android operating system family, which is the highest distribution level since its introduction in October 2011. This statistic is provided by Google based upon the number of devices accessing Google Play within a 14-day period up to August 1. Net Applications rates ICS at an even higher percentage of the Android market.
Android 4.0.3 to 4.0.4 account for 15.8 percent Android market share, a whopping 99.37 percent of the Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich deployment. After the release of popular Android smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S III running Android 4.0.4 or HTC One X running Android 4.0.3 as well as the updates to Android 4.0.4 to Sony Xperia S, Samsung Galaxy S II to Android 4.0.3, Motorola RAZR MAXX to Android 4.0.4, the update of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus to 4.0.4 on Verizon and GSM owners who haven’t yet updated to 4.1 and to other older devices, ICS 4.0.3-4.0.4 is justifiably more popular than Android 4.0-4.0.2, which is now just a speck in its rear view mirror.
There are more than 83 million active 'fake' users on Facebook
Tucked away in Facebook’s company filings published this week, was an interesting snippet of information. Although the social network had 955 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) as of June 30, 2012, an increase of 29 percent from this time last year, some 8.7 percent of that figure – around 83 million users - were identified by Facebook as likely to have come from fake sources.
The number of people actively using the service is calculated using internal company metrics based on the activity of user accounts, and Facebook has determined that roughly 4.8 percent of its MAUs may have originated from duplicate accounts, with a further 2.4 percent coming from user-misclassified accounts (that is personal profiles created instead of pages for businesses or "non-human entities," like pets), and 1.5 percent from undesirable accounts (those created by spammers, for example).
Tame the Windows 8 All Apps screen
If you install many apps and programs in Windows 8, you may notice that the system's Metro interface gets cluttered with shortcuts sooner or later. And while you can sort the shortcuts into groups to make everything manageable, it too is not an optimal solution.
When you switch to the All Apps screen of the Metro UI, for instance by right-clicking and selecting the All Apps option from the bottom toolbar that appears, or with the shortcut Ctrl-Tab, you may come to the conclusion that this interface is more suited for your needs.
Google Wallet finally gets real, expands to all major U.S. credit providers
Google on Wednesday afternoon made a huge announcement for its near field communications (NFC)-powered Google Wallet platform. Beginning August first, with an update to the Google Wallet app, Android phone users with supported NFC devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, HTC One X, or Fujistu Arrows, will be able to use any credit card from Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover as an NFC payment solution. These credit cards can be used at one of the 200,000 MasterCard PayPass-supported retail locations across the United States.
Not only does the update support the full assortment of major U.S. credit card companies, but it also moves the encrypted secure bit for credit card authentication off the phone, and into the cloud on Google's servers. Previously, the wallet ID (virtual card number) was stored in a secure encrypted storage area of the Android phone. This could corrupt the wallet on the phone if software updates were performed, or firmware was updated without clearing the wallet data first. But now with the new permissions being passed down from the cloud, there is an added level of security. That new level of security is the ability to remotely disable your mobile wallet app if your phone is stolen.
When is a phone camera enough?
That's the question I repeatedly asked while attending San Diego Comic-Con, which wrapped up about two weeks ago. Ian Lewis' "Let’s not blindly give every latest tech marketing prophet his profit", posted here Sunday afternoon, has me thinking about phone as camera again, in context of what's good enough.
A year ago, I took to Comic-Con the Fuji X100 to shoot photos and Sony HDR-TG1 camcorder for videos. I processed and uploaded content on a Mac laptop. But July 2012, I was a month into an Apple boycott over patent bullying. I still have the devices but now use the Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook. It's plenty good enough for processing photos using cloud services to edit, but I wasn't too sure about videos and decided not even to bother. During Google I/O I shot video on Galaxy Nexus, uploading directly to YouTube. That worked out just fine.
Gomigo gives quick access to favorite applications from Windows' system tray
If you’re looking for a faster way to access your Windows applications then you could pin the appropriate shortcuts to your taskbar, but that gets cluttered fairly easily. And while the Start menu offers more customization options, it’s also more bulky, and about to disappear in Windows 8 anyway.
Still, no problem, Gomigo is a more lightweight launcher that could be just what you need.
California court says Oracle must support Itanium-based servers as long as HP does
Santa Clara County Superior Court on Wednesday ruled that Oracle is contractually obligated to port its software products to HP's servers that utilize the Intel Itanium platform, despite Oracle's move to drop support for the 64-bit server platform in early 2011.
Intel's Itanium first began losing software support in 2009, when Red Hat announced Enterprise Linux 6 would not include the architecture, and then in Spring 2010, Microsoft announced Windows Server 2008 R2 would be the last version of the operating system to support Itanium, which was characterized as the industry's first CISC-based multithreading architecture.